A team of institutions is developing, organizing, and managing the next stage growth of the core integration (CI) capabilities of the National STEM Education Digital Library (NSDL). Collaborators include: UCAR, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the Merit Network, and Eastern Michigan University. The project is bringing together many efforts already underway, and engaging new efforts as well, in support of a comprehensive large-scale digital library expected to enhance every aspect of education in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. The organizational and technical underpinnings of the proposed work fall into three categories of effort, each within the overall context of educational excellence: 1) engaging the community, 2) providing technology, and 3) operating core services. To promote the vision of a strong NSDL community that sees itself as owning the program and having major influence on the character of the library, the project team is working with all NSDL-funded projects, helping to integrate their work into the library. Additional partnering with efforts such as those funded by the NSF's Digital Library Initiative and by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and independently developed collections and services, is also taking place. Development and support of models for intellectual property and digital rights management are being undertaken, as well as promotion of a library evaluation framework, administration of an NSDL program advisory group, and development of an overall governance mechanism for the NSDL. A robust, flexible information technology infrastructure is being implemented based on two themes: a "spectrum of interoperability" and "one library, many portals". The other two awards in this collaborative project are 0227648 and 0227656.
